IBM has been deported from Brisbane Airport’s data centre, with its X-series servers shoved on a flight to oblivion as the red carpet was rolled out for the triumvirate of VMware, EMC and Cisco.
Five of the latter’s UCS servers now nestle in racks at the airport’s data centre, where they run vSphere 5, play nicely with an EMC …

COMMENTS

I'm calling my Cisco rep right now!

If it wasn't for the faithful reproduction of Cisco PR pieces I would never have known the important, and quite impartial, news that Cisco products are easier to manage and use less power than the competition from IBM. Thanks El Reg! And Cisco.

Re: I'm calling my Cisco rep right now!

Poor decision for two reasons

First, the real news story that El Reg has missed. VMware just went after Cisco's switch empire with their acquisition of Nicira's vendor agnostic SDN. It is unlikely that VBlock will be around much longer as VMware/EMC and Cisco are about to be on very unfriendly terms. Second, VBlock is completely proprietary from tip to toe. The direction is towards open networks and vendor flexibilty. When VMware comes in and pitches this airport on the advantages of vendor agnostic SDN, they are likely to want to use the least costly fabric possible as they will just need dumb bandwidth. They won't be able to do that as they are now tied to Cisco. They might as well have just handed their checkbook to EMC/VMware/Cisco and just told them to write checks for whatever they think is fair. VBlock is a nice shortcut around thinking.

Work allot with these guys and they are a big customer. Must say that Cisco probably got this due some close relationships. However if this means they can start to move forward then great maybe now we can even look to move some of the xenserver systems (most critical systems in airport) into their DC ;)

I must say though I find it interesting that their networking partner that has cost them greatly and caused massive problems gets the PO for the servers.

Anonymous - to obviously they are an airport so print money and I collect some.

True, I work with a bunch of shops that have UCS as well. It is just amazing that the network, CCNAs types are able to get management to sign off on UCS. Typical conversation with CIO: How comfortable are you with the performance and agility of your network? "Not satisfied, it needs to change" How comfortable are you with the cost of your LAN, WAN? "It is outrageous. Cisco is charging excessively due to their proprietary lock-in" What are you plans? "We are going to implement Nexus and UCS"... Confused look.

I guess the thought is that if they just hand over everything to Cisco their integration and agility problems will be solved. As Cisco gives away UCS with their crazy costly network refreshes, the CIOs think the servers are free. Big difference between free and included. A lot of underqualifed CIOs out there listening to the completely biased recommendations of their networking people. It is a head shaker of a situation.